Page 67 of The Winter of Second Chances
‘I’ll get the rest of those boxes down for you and then I’ll have a look and see what I’ve got in the cellar to fix that hole,’ said John.
He saw Annie looking at him.
‘I keep a few things here for maintenance,’ he explained.
‘You don’t have to do it now.’
‘Trust me, you don’t want the north wind blowing through there. It can get pretty feisty down here at this time of year.’
Annie had to admit that she would rather not have wind whistling through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Not to mention the potential for large spiders to extend their creeping grounds down into the flat.
John was surprising her and she found herself in uncharted territory. He could have been an arsehole about the ceiling, but he hadn’t – quite the opposite, in fact. And Mrs Tiggy-Winkle had given him her seldom-offered seal of approval. There was no denying he was handsome. Could Annie be warming to John Granger?
The fixing of the hole took a long time and a lot of sawing, hammering, sanding and swearing. It was nearly half past six by the time John began to pack his tools back into the large canvas tool bag he had brought up from the cellar. Annie wondered if she ought to offer to cook him some supper. She had supplied him with mugs of tea and biscuits throughout the afternoon and, thankfully, his engagement in his ceiling task had prevented the need for any real conversation. This, Annie had decided, was a good thing, since they couldn’t be trusted not to argue if they steered away from the basic niceties. However, an offer of supper would invariably require actual talking. Not only this but, Annie realised, it might be misconstrued as something else.
John came into the sitting room. His hair was grey with dust. He’d removed his jumper and rolled up the sleeves on his shirt but kept it tucked neatly into his jeans. He looked like a lawyer who’d walked through an ash cloud. Annie had been through all the Halloween boxes and decided what she would and wouldn’t use. Then she had made lists of all the things she would use with suggestions of how and where she might display them to their best advantage.
‘I can help you with Halloween if you like,’ said John, drying his hands on a tea towel.
Annie frowned.
‘Really?’ This pulled her up short.
John shrugged.
‘Yeah. I’ve been part of enough of my aunt’s Halloween extravaganzas to know how they work. I mean, I know you’ve got the Saltwater Nook almanac and all,’ he said, nodding in the direction of Mari’s notebook back in its position on the coffee table. ‘But maybe some first-hand knowledge would be helpful.’
‘I didn’t think you’d...Yes, thank you, that would be great.’
‘I know what you think of me,’ said John.
‘Do you?’
‘You think I’m just some money-grabbing bastard who wants to stick his old aunty in a home and be done with her.’
‘I did think that to start with,’ Annie confessed.
‘And now?’
‘Now I don’t know what to think. You’re a bit of an enigma; devil or angel, depending on who you talk to.’
‘Small-town gossip.’
‘No smoke without fire?’
‘You know, it’s unfair to judge a person when you don’t have all the facts.’
‘Then why don’t you enlighten me?’
‘Because I don’t have to.’
There it was again: that arrogance that drove her half mad.
‘You ask me not to judge your motives and yet you won’t help me to understand them.’
John laid the tea towel on the radiator and began to roll down his shirtsleeves.
‘Perhaps you could try a little faith in humanity,’ he said, pulling on his knitted sweater and sending a small cloud of dust into the air like a halo around his head.
